Hey y'all!! How are we doing!? I am so excited! My exams are finally over and honestly, the feeling is like going to loo after you've been holding it for 5 hours. Now that exams are over, and the last one went better than average... I can see things going back to place, the way they used to be. Like, I haven't been reading my usual amount. This year I wanted to do a little Mid-year Freak Out Tag but unfortunately I hadn't read as many books and I felt over-all unmotivated to do this; the blogging. I have read 48 books so far, sounds a lot but isn't. 4 of them were literally 5-6 paged kid's poems by Dr. Seuss (my desperate attempts at not falling into a reading slump), 4 were the Heartstopper graphic novels and there were too many dnf's.
Not just books, I stopped listening to songs. I have been going without listening to my favourite bands for more than 4 months, and I LOVE SCREAMING THE LYRICS (let's just pretend whatever I scream is lyrics). And now Little Mix and BTS both are on a break. 😑
Suming it up, past months I have been losing my mind and my friends. I have had hopeless crushes who would keep me up at night and super annoying waves of inspiration for my novels, which would piss the shit out of me because I. SHOULDN'T. DO. ANYTHING. MORE. INTERESTING. THAN. STUDIES. God, the number of time I took a sigh and told myself, “study a lil, bitch”.
And I failed the first exam. Didn't get into my dream University.
Yikes.
So the mental health area hasn't been that well either.
BUT WE ARE HERE. AND WE SHOULD BE CELEBRATING! I am not here to depress anyone, not even myself, so let's talk about something that takes us away from the living hell, my past few months have been. Books!
I haven't been able to share my reading journey with y'all for a long time. Let's do the highlights you missed.
- Talking about the dnf's, *cough cough*, there were some huge disappointments. I read The Fine Print. Hated that. Here's a review. I think it's definitely overhyped. The male MC is a massive creep and I would never date a guy like that in real life, not even in an alternate reality.
- Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid became my favourite book of the year. It just really really touched all my soft spots. It was a valid critic that there were irrevelent chapters in that book from pov's of people we are not following and these people we don't care all that much about. So reading from their point of view was like a waste of time. I think it depends on you, though. If you like reading that kind of stuff, like celebrities, lush life, gossip, scandal, you would dig it. Oh, I did. But if that's not your jam, then you boring, you'll call it unnecessary and a tool to increase word count. I am quite critical with that kind of thing, but I chose to ignore it because the book hit me in all the right places. Some people call it a summer book, yeah it's set in summer, but it's not just a summer book. It's really deep. If you're gonna take a rec from this post, take that. Read Malibu Rising.
- Ashley Herring Blake might be becoming one of my all time favourite authors. I have read two books by her till now. First was A Girl Made Of Stars, which I read in January, and in July, I read her second book, How To Make A Wish. One word, phenomenal. She is SO GOOD with words and SO UNDERRATED. I haven't seen her in conversations on book community EVER, until recently, with the release of that Deliah Green book which is mostly a rom-com. The books I read were YA Contemporary. They were deep, profound, so well written and they just.. they HIT, okay? Both of them were 5 stars. ❤️ Heart. Ashley, ✨✨.
- I used to think that it takes a lot out of me to give a book 5 stars, but now... I saw this.
Funny, I never noticed. So apparently, I am easy to please, and just as easy to provoke. If you represent anything in your writing that makes me feel seen or comforts me in my crisis, doesn't matter the plot holes, I will probably give it a 5 star. It's unpredictable with me then. I am willing to give my five stars so easily but at the same time, I have zero temperamence policy with books that annoy me in the first few chaps. Speaking of which!
- I officially, finallllly, said my sweet goodbye to Colleen Hoover. She's just not doing it for me. I thought I would give her one last chance with All Your Perfects, after being disappointed in Reminders of Him, Ugly Love and Confess.. 3 flops back to back this year. I was on a break with her, thought I would give it a year before starting All Your Perfects. But that was the slimmest book on my shelf in times of crisis, and I was left with no choice. So, in All Your Perfects, (there are no spoilers it's just the first scene) there's this girl, X (I don't remember her name). She is gonna surprise her fiance, by arriving early in the city. You know what's gonna happen. He's banging someone else right now. So she reaches his floor and finds another guy, Y, pacing there. He's the boyfriend of the girl X's fiance is banging right now. He fills X on the status and so they do the normal thing anyone would in this position; bust their ass. Just kidding. They sit outside the door, X realises this is huge but ALSO, Y IS HOT!? Like amazing height dude, and those green green eyes. Yum yum yum. X thinks that Y's girlfriend must be hot, because Y is so yummy, so naturally high standards, and like, my fiance is more interested in her.. so. Classic Colleen. FMC who's not confident in her body, “Oh I must be the one *sob sob*”. After a while of sitting there, delivery guy comes, X's fiance has ordered their – X's and his, it's ‘their thing’, after sex meal for those two. So, X gets mad and she and Y sit there and eat that meal and those cookies. I can't be the only one who's thinking “what the fuck” at this point. Cheesy shit happens, very obvious attempts at creating a chemistry. Girl in dismal got a company so these two.. Love. Duh. Like, isn't that taking advantage of each other's low emotional status. Anyway, after a while, the door opens, X's fiance is there. He sees them😱 . Y's girlfriend is there, she sees them 😱. And X and Y stare at each other, Y practically forcing her to not look at them and let herself cry in front of him. His explanation, “He doesn't deserve to look at you break. We'll walk out of here as if nothing had happened”. I mean, you just walk in, know her for 20 minutes and now control how she reacts to something this huge in her life. It's her chance to emotionally face the whole lot that changed in her life in like 20 minutes. You're just taking that away from her, the closure, the way she wants. What gives him the right? They don't even do something cool like shame them there and walk out like winners and throw a fuckin' party. They just walk out of there like.. yeah, normal. Happens all the time. And she lets him control her. Pushover who? You can see where this is going. Dnf.
- I read Six Of Crows! And watched the Shadow And Bone Netflix Show!! I can't wait to read Crooked Kingdom! That's my next read for sure.
- It took me 2 books and a series to realise that I am not white. I am saying that not just because the main character in these rom-coms are white, but also the majority of people who like these books are white. Not just teenagers even, adults. I read A Thousand Boy Kisses and The Summer series (the second book, I will talk about in next point). I just do not relate to anything. I know there's popular opinion going around that they are cliches but even the people who say that, half of them atleast like these books and call it like, so emotionally heartbreaking. Bitch, where? For example, in A Thousand Boy Kisses, spoiler alert, these kids are 8, they kiss and say they will stay together forever. They're in a relationship. When they're 8. Have y'all even thought about a relationship when you were 8? I haven't. And then the guy's parents had to transfer and he throws a HUGE fit, saying disgusting stuff like : “You might think that just because I’m fifteen I’ll forget Poppy as soon as some slut from Oslo flirts with me. But that will never happen. And I will hate you every single second until I’m with her again.” My mouth when he says this, dropped. Oh!! And when he describes his love! I need to share that! “It was why she was my everything. My forever always. Because she was unique. Unique in a town full of carbon-copy bimbos. She didn’t want to cheer, or bitch, or chase boys. She knew she had me, just as much as I had her.” Yikes. Hard to take their ‘romance’ seriously after that, yeah? And then he comes back from that country after 3 years. She had abruptly stopped responding to his emails and totally blued him. So ofcourse, he was so broken, fell into wrong hands and got into cigarettes, alcohol, drugs? Idk. She sees him at a party, he's got a chic on lap, and he's about to kiss her and she thought all this time that he would not do it; kiss someone else ever. So she tears up, runs outta there and and he runs after her and throws her against the door or something. ((Btw, am I the only one who doesn't find it romantic. Throw me against the door and loom over me intimidatingly. Give me space, psycho.)) They pathetically fight. ‘Why you stop talking ’ ‘You're not you anymore. You kissin' that chic!’ ‘I ain't kissin' that slut! I getting a reaction from you.’ ‘I am sick. I have cancer. I didn't want to hurt you so I stopped talking to you.’ ‘Omg. Let's have sex, because you gonna be dead, we gotta have sex.’ ‘Please😭’. Uh.. yeah. Why do people like such books?
- The other book is Love And Other Words by Christina Lauren. Hmm. Time to unpopular opinion. Spoiler alert on. So this THE book that made me feel so ‘not white’. And the major part is the ending. I just really liked them; the main charactes, when they were kids. Their story was kinda cute you know. Except that they were way too smart to be kids when it came to vocabulary and she was really really horny. At the end, we find out why they stopped talking, yeah? So she drove up to the party he was at, another city, because he sounded really drunk on the call and she just wants to check if everything alright. Also, he had called her earlier and begged her to come over, be with him. When she arrives there, she finds his dick out and this other girl, on top of him, has definitely had sex with him before they both passed out on the bed. She does what I would do in this situation as a teenager, she leaves. And tries to pretend what happened wasn't true. Your boyfriend didn't cheat on you, while also feeling heartbroken. They're 17-18, so understandable. She doesn't get time to process any of this because her dad dies the next day and its traumatic. Rip the best character in the book, loved him. Years later he returns, her boyfriend she never broke up with, and they take ages to address this.. mess that happened. I am thinking, he has to have a fuckin' nice explanation. And he says, he was super drunk, he thought this other girl was her, and they had sex. And also, he tells her that she overreacted, she should have woken him up, tried to resolve this, but she left instead, created it all in her head, thought he could ever be the bad guy! He tells her at least two times that ‘You left. That's what you're great at. Grow up’. Hey, I would have been okay if the other readers and I saw eye to eye on this, and called him out on the bullshit he's shitting, but everyone's like, this is so sad!!! :) I- hello? This person got drunk. And then he thought that she came, and she started having sex with you, and you two were doing it, while it was actually not her but someone else. Okay, this is an excuse only 1st graders would make. 2nd, absolutely no guarantee that this guy wouldn't repeat this; think that she's someone else and fuck them at a party. How convenient is that!? Some people argue that this other girl raped him, because he was drunk. But I think that's bullshit as well, because who knows this girl was maybe drunk too. And he says “I thought we had sex”, referring to his girl, which means he was willing. He did it while he was drunk. He was the one who messed up. And he accuses her of running away!? I am pretty speechless, because wtf. I think I am not white because that is a BIG DEAL! My boyfriend fucking someone else at a party and his cock is out lolling for the world to see. And EVERYONE, including the writers think that it's a matter of miscommunication, and that's how the book portrays this as. Goddammit.
- I am currently reading a Chicken Soup book. If you don't know, Chicken Soup is a popular book series that compiles short stories from real people and there are all these different themes, like, for teenagers, grandmothers, relationships, mothers books. Short stories are all I could read in the last days of my exam. So yeah.
That is it for today. I think it was a longer post than I had expected but I basically reviewed a lot here. I haven't been able to put up longer reviews on Goodreads in a while. So this is what that build up to. Hope you enjoyed reading the post. I have a lot planned for future. So make sure you follow me :)
You can tell me in the comments, your highlights. Would be fun. See ya!!
((Note : The photos don't belong to me. Credits go to respective Bookstagram accounts. I follow all of these incredible people and me using their pics doesn't mean that we are of the same opinion.))
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